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Darrel Bristow-Bovey Has a Thousand Reasons Not to Write a Novel But Is Doing It Anyway

Darryl Bristow-Bovey’s second column for Random House Struik, “A forest of reasons not to write a novel”:

Say, are you writing a novel at the moment? Oh now, go on, don’t be shy, you’re not alone. Well, you are alone, obviously, in the sense that we are all of us alone on this long lurch down the darkling trail between the cradle and the grave, and also in the sense that writing a novel, if you do it properly, is as lonely an occupation as you could choose that doesn’t involve a single-handed sea-going circumnavigation of the world, or creating a centre of excellence at the SABC, or being a serial killer or a mime.

(Which makes me wonder: why are mimes so undesirable as husbands? Unlike the rest of us with our couches and TVs, you’d imagine at the end of a long hard day of work they’d probably come home and want to talk. Ladies, you don’t know what you’re missing.)